The US soldier who rampaged through two Afghan villages last year, gunning down 16 civilians and burning many of the bodies, has pleaded guilty to the murders under a deal hammered out by his lawyers that would spare him the death penalty.
Appearing before a military judge at Joint Base lewis-McChord, off Seattle, Sergeant Robert Bales admitted to the ghastly killings that shocked and angered the Afghan populace and outraged public opinion far and wide. Most of his victims were women and children.
Accepting the pleas entered by the 39-year-old Bales, Judge Colonel Jeffery Nance ruled that the soldier would face a maximum of life imprisonment without eligibility for parole. He would be sentenced in August, when a jury would determine if his life sentence would include the possibility of parole.
Asked why he carried out those horrific killings in Kandahar province in March last year, Bales simply said: “I’ve asked that question a million times since then, and there’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did.” Bales, who was armed with an M4 assault rifle and a 9mm pistol, said he used both the weapons.
“I formed the intent to kill and then did kill by shooting with a firearm and burning…,” he said, repeating the line for each of the 16 murder counts against him. Every time, he ended his confession with the remark, “This act was without legal justification.”
When asked pointedly if he was “authorized or justified or acting in self- defence”, he replied: “No, Sir.” Asked if he believed that his conduct was wrong, he said: “Yes, Sir.”
The soldier’s lawyers said their client, who had served four combat tours before the killings, had suffered a brain injury. He also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and under the influence of drugs and alcohol the night of the raids on family compounds in Kandahar province. Prosecutors, however, said the massacre was preplanned and that Bales was angry about a bomb blast near his outpost that wounded a fellow soldier.